Premiere/Interview: Shiny Toy Guns, “Waiting Alone”

Altpress.com is excited to bring you the exclusive premiere of Shiny Toy Guns' lead single, "Waiting Alone," off their upcoming album, III, out October 23 via Five Seven Music. This album sees the band reuniting with original vocalist Carah Faye Charnow from hits like "Le Disko" and "You Are The One." Below you can listen to the song and read an interview with bassist/synth player Jeremy Dawson on Charnow's return and where they are headed musically. You can purchase "Waiting Alone" here.

Why did you choose to premiere this song first? Jeremy Dawson: [The band] had a really hard time with "single" choices. To the point, we are not really the best people to ask about what the "first single" should be. III is a whole work for us. It’s a single group of thoughts that all point back to how we feel and have felt during these three years of life. We let others around us pick the first song off the album and are trusting them to make the right decision.

What makes it resonate with you as a single? The tune has Chad [Petree] and Carah [Charnow] together as a duet, which is classic Shiny Toy Guns, and the chorus is just something we believe just grabs and holds on tight. What's funny is that we wrote the chorus a long time ago, it stood the test of time and now it’s a lead off single. It’s a love song. It’s a story that everyone has dealt with in life. The lyrics reflect when you are blindly in love and you don't listen to the good advice from your friends. You just wait alone for that person that probably isn't good for you to finally notice you. You're waiting for this love to finally come home and give you the attention you deserve and desperately want.

How and why did reuniting with original vocalist Carah Faye Charnow back in early 2011 happen? We don't really try to figure out why it happened because it did so organically and naturally. Sometimes you just let things happen the way they want to happen. There wasn't a set time or a plan. Suddenly, things just began to change with us. One day, Mikey [Martin, drums] and I just hopped on a plane and flew to Sweden where she lived at the time. Then we sat down at a table with pizza and entirely too much coffee and began to try to figure out what happened in the past and figure out where things broke down. What we immediately figured out was that we loved each other too much for Shiny Toy Guns to go away.

To us, it had gone away from who we really were when we split apart from our original lineup. Most importantly, we found out that back in the We Are Pilots days, we were working way too hard, not sleeping and, basically, we just stopped communicating as individuals and as a band. The second we stopped doing that, everything just sort of got weird and unmanageable. Things that didn't even really exist became problems and those problems turned into dividing partitions that nearly tore the band apart. The three years apart was the amount of time we all needed in order to figure out the "how and why" question you are asking us. And now, a year-and-a-half of being our band again, we are just seamless. Everything is perfect and that’s how it should be and how it will remain.

What has Charnow’s return meant for the band's sound? It brought true inspiration on a personal level. Our sound and the progression of our sound is based on the world around us. That world is transcribed and reflected by the vocalists who are delivering the song or the story of our songs. When we started to work on III with Carah, suddenly a missing drive and inspiration to write something in a specific way or direction returned. That direction and sound is Shiny Toy Guns, who we were and who we are now, and it was like a time warp. It’s like nothing ever went wrong and nothing had gone away. We just stayed in that state of inspiration all the way until the record left the mastering studio as a complete thought and motion.

With four years since your last record, what are you hoping to show people this time around? This album is the story of where we started, where we jumped offline and how we came back together again, all in one hell of a life circle. You can feel it across the record. Up and down, left and right. Some of it is very personal due to things going on in individual members’ lives. Sometimes it’s thoughts from us all together. It’s a journey of real-life shit. We are extremely proud of it and would never change a thing. That’s a really place hard to get to, trust me. Really hard! It took us so long to flesh our album out to where we all could honestly say we love it.

What do you want people to know about the record? On a really serious level, this album is so unique and personal for us and for our fans because we both have been through hell and back. We are very proud to give this child up for adoption to our fans across the world who waited so damn long for us to get our hearts and our brains together, get our band back together, and make this happen. All love for them. And this album is for them.